Sunday, July 27, 2014

Auburn Branches Out

I took the ferry to the highway then I drove to a pontoon plane / I took a train to a taxi and a taxi to a train / I've been traveling so long / How am I ever gonna know my home when I see it again.
                                                                               --Joni Mitchell, Hejira, 1976


Auburn: I began a new journey with Chuck's blessing a year ago.  The trauma of Chuck's assault and the unspeakably difficult ensuing years of rehabilitating him to the best of my ability revealed fault-lines in my soul that reached much further back in time for me than 2009.

In five years, I have lived in over 16 places, carrying fewer and fewer possessions until I find myself down to a tent and an army cot, living quite peacefully concealed inside the trees and secondary growth of the country property we call The Ponds, going to sleep in the depths of green to the smells damp earth and sweet oxygen.  I take a canoe to my tent at night and canoe back to shore in the morning sometimes using only my bicycle for transportation all day. 

When I was 24, I was a reasonably experienced wilderness hiker and had planned to follow the spring up from Georgia to Maine on the Appalachian trail on my own and then take a year living in a rustic cabin in North Carolina for $40/month and write my first novel. I'm spending time with that younger version of myself now to learn what it is she was trying to be about, even though she may not have known.  I have the strength and capacity now to allow her to be and to learn whatever it is she needs to learn. 

In a few weeks, I'll have my Ohio principal's license and a renewed Ohio teaching license, Language Arts 9-12.  I've performed live story-telling on The Moth Mainstage, interned in 5 different schools in Ohio and Ann Arbor, Mi, completed 30 more graduate education hours, writtenpiles of papers, applied for dozens of jobs and interviewed for three.  

I've sought and received a great deal of sustaining wisdom from all kinds of people, places and situations. 

The friendship with Michael Ayers faltered though we all meant well.  In the end, Chuck and I were seeing evidence of our grace being mis-used, and, although we had knowingly signed up for a certain amount of that, wisdom said "Close the door."  It may be that Michael is back in jail for a series of parole violations, but we're not certain and we no longer consider it our business.  

We have closed the building on Grand Ave where the assault happened and we've given the keys back to the bank.  

With a ceasing of all this effort to somehow redeem the incalculable losses through "saving" the building and "saving" a restoration process with the assailant, I, for one, felt the full, unmitigated weight of all the loss; the pain was intense.  But in a very short amount of time, it lessened and I began to feel darkness and complication leaving me.  I am healing on some new level.  

Chuck and I are still speaking in different venues and doing a bit of work here and there to keep Chuck Sandstrom Enterprises going.  Our love abides. 

Love abides. 

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